Twitter layoffs: Elon Musk asked employees to justify roles, rate colleagues and prepare for ‘high intensity’ work
Within months of buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, Elon Musk had fired half the staff.
Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. The social media platform has since been renamed X by the billionaire and has laid off 6,000 employees- roughly 80 per cent of the company’s staff. The radical downsizing- which was announced by Elon Musk when he took over X- has also been observed in other tech companies in the world since.
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Following the takeover, Elon Musk took the social media company private which made his decisions less transparent owing to which within months of buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, he had fired half the staff. He told the remaining staff to prepare for “extremely hardcore” working hours “at high intensity” as he brought Steve Davis and James Musk to examine whether existing employees represented value for money.
The workforce at Twitter was forced to justify their roles and even judge whether their own colleagues should be retained. The job cuts affected departments like diversity and inclusion teams as well as product development and design. Even, Twitter’s content moderation team was not spared.
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The Telegraph reported citing a source in the know, “It was clearly pretty bloated. You had to right-size the organisation. When he cuts a team, he cuts the whole team and that creates significant chaos."
After reports emerged that Elon Musk was planning to cut workforce of Twitter in October 2022, Brad Gerstner, an investor at Altimeter Capital, wrote to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people.”
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David Freidberg, a technology investor, said Elon Musk’s layoffs “kind of set a new standard for Silicon Valley firms. A lot of folks might end up saying, maybe we should go deeper."
Meta, Amazon and Google also cut jobs following Twitter layoffs as these tech companies laid off 165,269 staff in 2022, 263,180 in 2023 and 96,551 so far this year, as per layoffs.fyi.
